August 15, 2012

Go over there and read the gasping about how racist and left-wing it all was, but to me, having lived through Critical Race Theory, every single thing she wrote looks completely banal by the standards of 1988. She said exactly what you'd expect someone in her place and position to say at that time to please her superiors and to gain favor. I'd only knock her for a lack of originality and daring. To uncover this dreary student work and declare a-ha is embarrassing and silly.

She said exactly what you'd expect someone in her place and position to say at that time to please her superiors and to gain favor.

Do you expect your students to behave this way, to parrot back your opinions and attitudes? If this happens do you say to yourself "Ah, another outstanding student headed for a brilliant and worthwhile career," or is it more like "Oh well, another cookie-cutter sycophant becoming just another prole of the legal profession."

As opposed to the "positivity" of claiming your opponent murdered somebody, tortures dogs, is a felon, and wishes to reinstitute slavery?

having lived through Critical Race Theory, every single thing she wrote looks completely banal by the standards of 1988.

Are you aware that this is one of the major critiques of colleges for decades? That mind-numbingly idiotic and racist piffle gets taken seriously by "intellectuals"? You can find professors still subscribing to Communism as a valid economic theory and Marx as an economic theorist worth taking seriously.

Nobody is a dumber than an intellectual who learned something idiotic at a young age. NOTHING will change their minds.

If anybody said anything that asinine in a real job, they'd be turfed so quickly it'd leave skid marks.

The story is that all that time, effort and expense produced that fruit, and it was exactly the fruit she was required to produce.

What a waste of a possibly talented woman, and the same for her husband too, who I assume produced similar work if he did any at all, since we aren't allowed to see it, and the media could care less about the college performance of the candidate for the most important job in the world.

In both cases, banality and lack of vigor or curiosity seems a prerequisite, when such a thing would get your resume tossed in the trash at most merit based jobs.

Our institutions are shells of their former relevance and contribution, and it's almost entirely due to leftist ideology, but remember: all ideologues are equally scary.

Racism is still a problem in the black community. She and her husband are no exception. To be fair, it is difficult to accept that the choices of your mother and your own choices have doomed you and your children to poverty. Blaming whitey is so much easier, so much less painful. Bill Cosby says it is like a drug.

Alas, the same thing can be said for almost every single thing we find offensive in the world. If you only consider the context of those who say it, it's not really offensive at all, is it?

So I guess we give the slaveholders who, in the context of the world in which they lived, were quite shining examples of morality and rationality. While we're at it, can we just be forgiven that our ancestors killed the ancestors of other people, considering they were only acting appropriately for their time and place.

What are some examples of the pervasive social damage present today that is due to conservative (classic liberal) values and influence - something similar to the scope and depth of that cause by modern liberal values.

Where is the conservative values-caused equivalent of all the wasted lives spent on women's, ethnic, or other "studies", and the trillions lost on wasteful government departments and careers in those fruitless bureaucracies. Many of those started out in law school.

It has been an incredibly, if not fatally, expensive experiment and almost entirely one sided. Could we at least try something different? We could start by realizing that the Obamas are exactly the wrong people to look to for hope or change. Their lives are a pretty clear proof of it.

She said exactly what you'd expect someone in her place and position to say at that time to please her superiors and to gain favor.

Either she genuinely believed what she wrote in that BLSA newsletter, which would make her a blatant racist, I grant that she may have modified her views since then, but I've seen no evidence of that. Or she didn't which makes her amoral climber -- one willing to say or do whatever it takes to gain favor, riches and power. Again, I grant her soul may be different now, that somehow between law school and the Eat Wing Michelle Obama managed to acquire a moral compass (Jeremiah Wright's sermons?... Ebay?)

Ann wants to dismiss this controversy as just an example commonplace leftish banality, but I must ask her to imagine those words flowing from Ann Romney's pen with the racial adjectives swapped. Would that be merely banal? And would the discovery be merely embarrassing and silly?

I tend to agree that this is too much about nothing. Still, I think Michelle Obama's paper is of mild interest because there's nothing in her adult life that's inconsistent with what she wrote in that paper. She could have believed what she wrote back then and still believe it today and have lived the same life.

For example, she once claimed she was never proud of her country until her husband won the nomination. This claim could have been nothing more than a moment of in-articulation or it could have been a rare glimpse into the heart of someone who loathes many of the things that are commonly understood to make America American. Her paper is just one more grain of sand on the side of the scale that says Michelle Obama really is, at heart, as anti-american as someone who holds the beliefs that were common among critical race theorists. Her paper doesn't answer the question, but it's a mildly interesting piece of evidence.

I find her assumption that females (and minorities, but the female part is personal) are somehow held back by being expected to meet the same standards as males in the meritocracy extremely insulting. I held my own in the meritocracy of law school just fine, despite having breasts.

I'm struggling with a cheap replacement keyboard while awaiting a new wireless LogiTech. This one is so cramped and oddly proportioned that I can hardly type three words without a typo. I'm catching most of them, but the errors that are themselves genuine words are harder to detect. It's called an ONN keyboard, bought at WalMart for $8.99 and worth every penny

By "student work" I thought you meant this was an assignment for class. I approve of lying to professors, at least by implication or careful avoidance of tromping too hard on their prejudices. I suppose, perhaps, that writing for a campus publication gets you points with the powers that be, too, so it's the same thing. I don't know if I could do it though.

Still, views change and mature as we get older. At least they usually do. Or sometimes do. I favor not holding up youthful folly on the theory that I'd like the same consideration.

I won't even get to entirely gleeful about the horrible, convoluted English. She was even less personally responsible for that than she likely was for the trendy ideas.

AllenS said: What were the standards of 1988? How about 1978? What are the standards of 2012? How often do standards change in law school?

This is important because Althouse admits that such thinking was the norm in law schools:

Go over there and read the gasping about how racist and left-wing it all was, but to me, having lived through Critical Race Theory, every single thing she wrote looks completely banal by the standards of 1988.

I think any sane tax payer in Wisconsin deserves to know how much of that philosophy still remains at the UW Law School. If it has changed, then put it on display! If it hasn't changed, then expect more people to cheer when the so-called Law School Bubble pops.

I wonder what the young Michelle Obama would have thought about Harvard's subsequent I'm Cherokee-because-I-have-high-cheekbones hiring of Elizabeth Warren. I have to think this was not what she would have had in mind to expand minority hiring among the faculty.

I wonder what the young Michelle Obama would have thought about Harvard's subsequent I'm Cherokee-because-I-have-high-cheekbones hiring of Elizabeth Warren. I have to think this was not what she would have had in mind to expand minority hiring among the faculty.

Dude, look at Warren. If that doesn't scream "I'm TOTALLY not a WASP" at you, I don't know what does.

AllenS said...every single thing she wrote looks completely banal by the standards of 1988.

What were the standards of 1988? How about 1978? What are the standards of 2012? How often do standards change in law school?

In history it's called revisionism. Sometimes there is a step to more knowledge and better insight as the views of past historians get challenged and altered. But often it's just someone trying to make a reputation. Gotta have some new twist on the old act.

Another way to view it is serial conformity. Conform to the norm if you want to get along in academia. A few brilliant souls can break that rule, but that vast mediocrity does not dare. As a student at least, Michelle never sought to go beyond the well trod currently acceptable middle path.

OK, so we're not to place any significance in the fact that Michelle is simply an intellectual product of her time, place and self identity, or whether her views have the slightest validity or whether they inform her or her husband;s views or influence the policy of our government?

Althouse: "She said exactly what you'd expect someone in her place and position to say at that time to please her superiors and to gain favor."

I hate to go all Godwin, but that shit didn't fly for Adolf Eichmann, and it won't fly with Michelle Obama. Right and wrong aren't relative and don't change with the changing times. Putting attitudes into historical context doesn't make much sense when you're talking about a period of just 20 or 30 years.

I've read enough of your writing to have a pretty firm opinion that you're a very principled person, Althouse. I find some of your recent posts to be profoundly confusing.

When I read your post about having a fear of all ideologues, I thought: That's odd. These are just very principled people who are steadfast in their beliefs. Why would you fear them for consistency? Sure, if they're consistently evil Marxist or Nazi bastards, then they're fearsome. But...libertarian ideologues? Not very scary.

And now you're defending a hard-left ideologue: Michelle Obama's attitudes don't appear to have evolved over time. No biggie, that was par for the course at that time, you say.

Having read the Althouse blog for some time, every single thing she writes in defense of leftist academic anti-white/Asian/Jewish racism looks completely banal by the standards of leftist academic racists. She says exactly what you'd expect someone in her place and position to say. I'd knock her for a lack of originality and daring, but mostly for moral cowardice.

She said exactly what you'd expect someone in her place and position to say at that time to please her superiors and to gain favor.

To which I would say "ho-hum", as well, except that now 24 years later a cohort (mayors, school district superintendents, Dep't Chairs, University Presidents, Dep'y Sec'y's of such-and-such)of like mindset are now entrenced in our daily lives. We'll be reaping the whirlwind for years to come.

She said exactly what you'd expect someone in her place and position to say at that time to please her superiors and to gain favor.

And you can't see any negatives in that? Seriously?

Look, I was a liberal arts (not law) grad student for several years starting in 1989, at a university possibly even better known for radicalism than your own. Did some students do the liberal/radical faculty suck-up dance? Yes, of course they did. (It took slightly different forms in my department, but it went on, and certainly you could see the same dynamic playing itself out all over the university.)

The point is: Most did not. The people who shared the then-favored race/gender/SES line of thought honestly embraced it in their coursework. The people who didn't mostly tried to avoid the subject, apart from a combative small minority who fought the whole Zeitgeist. (Max Boot, now long since at the WSJ, was one of those. I must say he's mellowed out quite a lot since his days as the token right-wing attack dog at the Daily Cal.)

My point is that if you write like that, either you're sucking up to The Powers That Be, or you really believe what you're writing. It was perfectly possible (yes, even in 1988) not to do either.

Regardless of whether "She said exactly what you'd expect someone in her place and position to say at that time to please her superiors and to gain favor" or really thought/think along these lines, neither paint her in good light.

So why do you assume she's just parroting back what she considers bs. Maybe she swallowed the whole thing hook, line and sinker. Isn't that somewhat predictable from someone who thinks her country downright mean and in which she had never been proud?